"Oh, I just came to Him," she answered. "And," as she reflected of
that night's compact, "I gave myself up to Him."
So that was the way Winifred found Him. Was that the way to "believe"?
But Winifred had none of his doubts about God. She believed that He
was, and the mental assent led to the heart surrender. But if he
should _do_ her act of faith--? If a man with doubts should give
himself up would he be received? With such reflections Hubert went out
into his day's work.
Again he accomplished the day's business with faithfulness to all
details, but with the consciousness every hour of a perplexity
unsolved--a burden unlifted. Again he was glad when the office door
closed behind him and he turned his face homeward, striding beneath his
umbrella through the now settled rain, with the Greek Testament grasped
in his hand.
An attractive wood fire burned in the drawing-room grate that evening,
but Hubert resisted its invitation and retired to his "scientific den,"
as Winifred called it, to pursue his new studies. He set himself to
read again in the Greek that which he had read in English. He was
struck by the fact that the word translated "believe" was also rendered
"commit" in a passage in the second chapter. That seemed somewhat more
practical to his apprehension.
He lingered long on the interview with Nicodemus, and as the rain beat
upon the roof and window pane he listened to the words uttered on a
Judean night, so long ago, to a man who like himself sought the truth.
In the first chapter of the Gospel, in its introduction, he had caught
a glimpse of infinite stretches and light unapproachable, and it seemed
no marvel that a man, if he would enter that kingdom, _must be born
into it_! Marvel, indeed, it might be, that such a birth were
possible, but not that it was needful. For how could he transgress the
boundaries of the human sphere into which he had been born, and lift
himself into the higher? It was impossible. No, that life must
somehow come forth to him. He must be "born from above."
As he read on into the book, still bearing in mind the character
ascribed to Jesus Christ in its beginning, he could not wonder that He
spoke with such authority. Not "Thus saith the Lord," but "Verily,
verily, I say unto you," the new Prophet declared. What wonder, if He
were such a Being as described, that He should offer living water to
the Samaritan woman, since "in Him was life," nor that "the work of
God" for obtaining eternal life should be narrowed down to a belief
in--a committal unto--Himself?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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